Trial News

The Eighth Circuit has affirmed that a St. Louis police officer is not entitled to qualified immunity after he stopped, frisked, and handcuffed a person who watched from a distance as another officer conducted traffic stops. The court found that the detaining officer violated the plaintiff’s clearly established right to observe police-citizen interactions without interfering and ruled that his §1983 suit may proceed. (Chestnut v. Wallace, 2020 WL 360458 (8th Cir. Jan. 21, 2020).)

While jogging in a park one evening, Kevin Chestnut stopped for several minutes to watch a female police officer perform traffic stops about 30 or 40 feet away across a street. Chestnut claims that he stood still in a location where he was clearly visible to the officer.

The officer observed him and radioed for assistance, describing Chestnut’s appearance. Officer Dawain Wallace responded to the call, saw Chestnut, and approached him to ask for ID. Chestnut did not have any but provided his name, birthday, and the last four digits of his Social Security Number (SSN), refusing to provide the full number. Wallace frisked Chestnut for weapons without finding any, asked another officer to handcuff Chestnut, and checked and confirmed that Chestnut did not have any outstanding warrants. Despite this, Wallace did not release Chestnut until a supervisor arrived and directed that Chestnut be permitted to leave.

Chestnut sued Wallace under 42 U.S.C. §1983, alleging he had been stopped without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. The defendant moved for summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity, which the district court denied. The Eighth Circuit agreed to review on interlocutory appeal.

Police officers are entitled to qualified immunity when their professional actions do not violate a constitutional right that was “clearly established” at that time. Wallace argued that when he interacted with Chestnut, the law had not clearly established it would be a rights violation to handcuff a suspect who “seemingly obscures himself in a dark area of a public park after nightfall to watch [a female police officer]” and refused to provide his SSN to an officer.

The court had “some difficulties” with this argument. Although the court agreed with Wallace that he had detained rather than arrested Chestnut—meaning that all Wallace needed to justify the stop was “reasonable suspicion that criminal activity [was] afoot”—it found that Chestnut’s actions were insufficient to create that suspicion. In United States v. Sykes (914 F.3d 615 (8th Cir. 2019)), the Eighth Circuit ruled that a person’s decision during a “consensual police encounter to ignore the police and go about his business” cannot be the basis of reasonable suspicion. Applying Sykes, the court found that Chestnut’s refusal to give his full SSN was also insufficient. “It would make no sense to require an officer to allow someone who provides no information to walk away but then to permit an officer to detain someone who gives him only partial information,” the court wrote.

The court also concluded that, viewing the facts in the plaintiff’s favor, Wallace had violated Chestnut’s clearly established constitutional rights. The court relied on Walker v. City of Pine Bluff (414 F.3d 989 (8th Cir. 2005)), in which John Walker was arrested for obstructing government operations after observing from a distance an encounter between officers and a group of young men. Walker later sued his arresting officer, and in that case, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the officer’s request for qualified immunity should be rejected, because no reasonable officers could have believed they had probable cause to arrest Walker in that situation.

Here, the Eighth Circuit ruled that, under this precedent, Wallace had “violated Chestnut’s clearly established right to watch police-citizen interactions at a distance and without interfering.” Although Wallace tried to distinguish Walker on several grounds—for example, the fact that Walker was arrested, not detained—the court rejected those arguments. It ruled that “in both cases, no reasonable officer could conclude that a citizen’s passive observation of a police-citizen interaction from a distance was criminal.”

The court also noted that the First, Third, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits—every circuit court to have considered this related question—has “held that a person has the right to record police activity in public.” The court found this authority persuasive, writing that “if the constitution protects one who records police activity, then surely it protects one who merely observes it.” Although the Eighth Circuit majority agreed with the dissent that the qualified immunity doctrine is “important to society as a whole,” it stated that the “people’s ability to monitor police activities to ensure that their duties are carried out responsibly” is equally valuable.

St. Louis attorney Robert Herman, who represents the plaintiff, was pleased with the decision. “This is a clear case of the police overstepping their authority and creating a problem where none existed before their intervention. Mere unidentifiable and boundless suspicion cannot be the basis for random, or at worst, retaliatory searches and arrests; otherwise, there is nothing left of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.”

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